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Who among us developers doesn’t know StackOverflow? If you don’t know it then there is a big chance you didn’t search for any programming related question in the last 7 years, so you either are doing a super great job, using a super old community of old school programmers, or actually didn’t practice programming for some really long time.

StackOverflow reached more than 10 million questions, I won’t list those amazing numbers and statistics here, feel free to see them on StackOverflow’s 10M page, they are really great to read and to try to imagine them.

I’m not going to talk about its history, the internet is full of those articles, you can read about it from Wikipedia or from its co-founder Joel Spolsky. I will talk about my story and how I see StackOverflow in this occasion, it’s my way of celebrating the success of this global platform, and the success of humanity there.

Now I’m not going to talk about user input validation, no that’s something that’s been covered a lot around the web, I’m going to talk about something else.

Let’s imagine you are designing a game, where the user can create a puzzle, for example a maze, and you want to verify that what the user has input is a valid maze, that if played by another player that player will have a chance of winning it. Normally the solution that would come to your (and mine) mind is to try to solve that maze automatically – also we’re not going to talk about the different algorithms for solving mazes – but there is another way to do it that no one told us about in Algorithms 101!